Masculinity
Magic tricks
Five short stories with male narrators – including a seahorse and a vampire – revolve around masculinity’s contradictory demands and the wish to belong
A bitter sectarian divide: Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize,…
When did traditional masculinity become toxic?
It’s hard for privileged white men to stay relevant in this age of identity politics but a number of fail-safe…
Help! I've got 'schlong Covid'
One of the difficulties with having difficulties in your gentleman’s area is describing it to your doctor. Saying ‘I’ve got…
Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed
Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies…
How to be a man
Gstaad I was reading in these here pages Julie Burchill’s review of Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in…
Manning up
Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first…
Even the sternest Leavisite critic would find it hard to resist BBC2's Peaky Blinders
The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in…
Nine angst-ridden men
‘Insufficiency’ is a favourite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in…
The rise of the man bun, the Mancan and man boobs
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he had learnt to laugh by reading Twitter. ‘Now they’ve got falsies.’ He…
